MACAULAY'S USE OF AUTHORITIES 73
detailed and systematic examination of the authorities
would have saved Macaulay from some serious errors.
Two other classes of authorities must be more briefly
treated—namely, the mass of official papers, illustrating
the administrative and executive government of the time,
which may be generally described as domestic state papers.
Macaulay had practically no new information about the
debates which took place in Parliament: he used reports
of those debates which were already in print, adding here
and there a little information from memoirs or letters or
foreign despatches. These reports had been very little
used, and as the existing histories of William Ill's reign
were obsolete or unreadable, his animated account of pro-
ceedings in Parliament had all the air of novelty to his
readers. However, he had one set of documents, illus-
trating parliamentary affairs, which had never been em-
ployed by any previous historian, and never printed—
namely, the papers of the House of Lords. Papers relating
to the proceedings of Parliament tended to be preserved in
the archives of the Lords rather than the Commons,
because the Lords made it a rule to insist on seeing the
originals of communications laid before Parliament and
declined to accept copies. Hence many papers which
properly should have found their way into the archives of
the Lower House are now in those of the Lords. More-
over, bills which failed to pass and amendments not
accepted accumulated there, too, till a vast mass of papers
for the political and economic history of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries was brought together. In chap-
ter xi, when Macaulay describes the legislation which
followed the Revolution, he mentions the fate of the com-
prehension bill, which marked the failure of the last effort
to bring the Presbyterians within the fold of the Church.